A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

JOHN ROMER

A History of Ancient Egypt,

Volume 2

From the Great Pyramid to the

Fall of the Middle Kingdom

Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin’s Press

New York

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Table of Contents

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About the Author

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Preface

The first volume of this history described the creation of the pharaonic state and ended at around 2550 BC with the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. For the most part it was a silent history, since hardly any writings have survived which illuminate that millennial process. This second volume, alternatively, moves into an altogether noisier era for it begins as the archaic silence of those early pyramids is slowly broken by a growing chatter of hieroglyphic texts and it ends at around 1770 BC, with the pharaonic state in full bloom and with its scribes having created an elegant courtly literature.

The timelines of the two volumes do not meet at a single point but are spliced together at an angle across the century in which the Great Pyramid was built and at the time when the use of texts and inscriptions had started to increase. The history in this second volume, therefore, is different from that of Volume 1, for the growing presence of those texts allows the possibility of ancient thought as expressed in written language to become part of the main narrative.

History, it is commonly observed, is a dialogue between past and present worlds. As far as the modern history of ancient Egypt is concerned, where ancient texts have always been the key, it is essentially a dialogue between those ancient texts and the two centuries of Western scholarship that have followed their decipherment. A dialogue so commanding that the attitudes and opinions of a handful of leading Western academics are as much a part of modern ‘ancient Egypt’ as are the pyramids of Giza.

It seems to me, therefore, that to avoid confusion, the author of any new history of pharaonic culture should outline how and why their vision differs from that which underlies that standard modern version of ‘ancient Egypt’.

Given that the roots of the modern humanities lie in the study of the classics it is hardly surprising that the first Western histories of that freshly deciphered ancient culture were based on the narratives of classical historians, and thus they were concerned with political, ethnic and dynastic struggle. At the same time, however, those histories were created at the beginning of the modern age in Europe, in times of social and industrial revolution, when the concepts of the nation state and of imperialism were burning fierce and fresh. So the protagonists in those pharaonic histories were fired with the spirit of that age, with themes of wealth and war, class, ethnicity and overweening power. And given contemporary Egypt’s place within that nineteenth-century world, they were acted out against an oriental backdrop.

In reality, however, the hundred and fifty generations that built and maintained pharaonic culture have long gone, and precious little of them or of their history remains. And the yawning gaps in the fundamental information required to build the usual narratives of Western history books are still bridged by the attitudes and assumptions of nineteenth-century historians. And there’s the rub, for although their traditional tales lend pharaoh’s alien relics an illusion of familiarity, they have deeply sinister undertones.

For modern-day ‘ancient Egypt’ is a direct offspring of the nineteenth century’s intense study of race and ancient language; those same studies whose terms and concepts later served to ratify the underlying character of Hitler’s Third Reich. This is not, of course, to assert that the academics of several different nationalities who laid down the foundations of modern-day ‘ancient Egypt’ were particularly sadistic, or especially racist or, indeed, imperialist, but simply that they shared a tenor of their times. Georg Steindorff, for example, a one-time rector of Leipzig University and the most renowned egyptological victim of Nazi persecution, regarded himself as a full member of the nation whose high conservative values he had upheld all his life. In the years before the First World War, Steindorff had written a popular and influential history, Die Blütezeit des Pharaonenreichs – literally, ‘the heyday – the flowering – of the pharaonic empire’, which describes ancient Egypt admiringly as an imperial power. A decade earlier, Adolf Erman, the founder of modern egyptology and Steindorff’s professor at Berlin, had observed that the ancient Egyptians had ‘never experienced the invigorating influence of a great national war’. Though differing in expression, their phantasmagorical preoccupation with empire building as a moral force is the same and was a product of their times. Along with several other academic colleagues, however, Walter Grapow, Erman’s coeditor of the standard dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language was, indeed, an ardent Nazi, a person for whom great histories were forged by mighty individuals, and such dictionary entries as ‘kingdom’, ‘blood’ and ‘soil’ – ‘Reich,’ ‘Blut’ and ‘Boden’ – held immediate contemporary resonance. And in the following generation those ideas were enlarged to contain the notion that pharaoh had been a god-like personality, the embodiment of the principles of blood and soil which, they considered, had run deep within that ancient race. Down to this day, indeed, alongside other equally unproven assumptions, many specialists would still assert that the ancient Egyptian kingdom had been born in blood and battle and that the living pharaoh had been held to be a god.

In my first years in Egypt, in the 1960s, I met and worked with several kindly scholars who had been students of some of the founders of the so-called Berlin School and they introduced me to ancient Egypt and its modern academic literature in long and generous conversations. Many now-retired professors were taught by that same generation; modern-day egyptology, indeed, is largely composed of generations who are the direct inheritors of that complex tradition. Several current university course books, also, were written by egyptologists who had enthusiastically greeted Hitler’s rise to power or who were later banned outright from teaching in post-war Germany because of their disreputable activities during the 1930s.

Such works are widely used, it would appear, in the belief that at its root egyptology is a science and thus above all earthly politics, and that our knowledge of pharaonic culture and its history is a continually unfolding revelation of truth with each generation of scholars standing unquestioningly upon the shoulders of its predecessors.

Yet egyptology is not a science and neither, certainly, is the writing of history. Scientists inquire into precisely defined aspects of universal order. Most egyptological researchers, alternatively, spend their time retrieving and collating the random relics of complex and varied human activities. Nor is there a universal narrative of history, as many in the nineteenth century West believed, no world order involving race, or greed or power or growing human intelligence into which the products of egyptological research can be scientifically slotted, no clues, no breakthroughs that will represent the final pieces of a jigsaw to encompass and explain a hundred and fifty generations of an ancient culture. Yet to this day, many academic writings on the history of ancient Egypt are based upon the assumptions and beliefs of a century and more ago when egyptology and history itself, indeed, was thought to be a science. And certainly, the same discredited visions underpin the novellas, the movies and the popular ‘ancient Egypt’ of today.

Commentators were complaining about the inadequacies of such narrow visions of ancient history even as they were being created. Nietzsche was probably the most prescient and certainly the most vituperative; such histories, such visions of the past, he held, had nothing of the grace, the ecstatic joy of life, the ruthless precisions and perfections, the creative engagement with words and materials that he detected in so many ancient things. A decade later, he had been joined by Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler complaining that contemporary historians were ‘not amusing travelling companions. Not for long, at any rate … Just you try it! Nothing but the history of civilization morning, noon, and night’. In Hedda’s day, of course, in the Belle Époque, her contemporaries deemed the culture of contemporary Europe to be the highest form of world civilization. No wonder, then, that after the Great War, Joyce would have Stephen Dedalus famously remark that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.

Today as well, several leading egyptologists have little time for such traditional views of history. But they do not write books for the wider public and tend to avoid such controversies which, at their root, are expressions of political ideologies and concern the order of such human institutions as governments and universities and, ultimately, the nature of humankind itself. Now and again, however, they quietly comment on the way that things have gone. John Baines, for example, in a learned essay on the origins of pharaonic writing, finds it necessary to remind his readers that the people who created the ancient Egyptian language were surely more intelligent than most of their modern interpreters, whilst Barry Kemp, remarking about a contemporary version of the ‘Blut und Boden’ myth as applied to ancient Egyptian history, gently notes that ‘A. Hitler’ had already given the idea ‘a crude airing’. At the same time too, there is a growing interest in the internal history of academic egyptology; Thomas Schneider, notably, carefully documenting the impact of the rise of Nazidom upon the Berlin School. This, then, is the heavily mottled backdrop against which this history has been written.

I originally anticipated that the opening sections of this second volume of my history – the period, that is, from the Old to the Middle Kingdom – would be fairly brief. The surviving data, after all, is relatively thin, so traditional histories devote less than a third of their texts to those eight centuries and they are generally padded out with information gleaned from later ages, a method based upon notions of the unchanging nature of so-called ‘primitive’ societies that I had long planned to discard.

Even as I began my researches, however, a cascade of fresh information was starting to appear. The product of various excavations undertaken within Egypt in the deserts and along the Red Sea coasts, it extended beyond all previous imaginings, the scope and scale of travel undertaken by the pharaonic court during those two long periods. At the same time too, innovative studies of long-known texts coupled with the discovery of some astonishing documents from recent excavations had further expanded our knowledge of those times. In short, excavation and research had revised all previous conceptions of Old and Middle Kingdom history. And this eventually necessitated an extension of my original scheme of this history from two volumes to three, this second volume finishing at the ending of the Middle Kingdom, a third with the ending of pharaonic culture.

As with Volume 1, my ambition has been to make a history without boundaries, without any previous theories about the composition or character of the pharaonic state beyond those evidenced or documented in the contemporary relics. I also aim to shed a common hubris of historians that pretends to explain all things, for there are huge amounts of fundamental data concerning pharaonic culture that we do not presently possess and probably never will. After two centuries of detailed and dedicated investigation academics have, however, recovered notices of most of ancient Egypt’s rulers and some of their subjects and carefully placed them all together, in sequence, on a single timeline. Yet there is still insufficient information to provide a fact-based profile of any ancient individual. And such events as are recorded are hardly ever elements of continuing narratives like those of our traditional history books; those tales that Auden dubbed ‘the usual squalid mess of history’.

So rather than setting the remaining information into the traditional divisions of classical dynasties or individual reigns and constructing what are, essentially, a series of fake mini-biographies of courtiers and kings, I have made a history built up from facts upon the ground. A history in which the texts and images, the stones, bricks and papyri that have survived are brought together with the scanty traces of the people who created them and are all set again within the ancient countryside, on the surrounding seas and deserts and all along the River Nile. So the surviving data – essentially, a series of random snapshots, an angry letter, a broken pot, a hair caught in a comb, a splendid jewel with pharaoh’s name – are set against the longue durée, the underlying currents, the monuments, the harbours, mines and quarries, the ageless desert roads, the traces of abundance and disaster.

There is as well a special hazard in the telling of this history. As Wittgenstein had long ago observed, entire mythologies are held within our language. And the translation of the ancient texts has veiled our modern ‘ancient Egypt’ in such common Western terms as ‘king’ and ‘nation’, ‘soldier’, ‘courtier’ and ‘priest’; words that by themselves alone threaten to set the surviving fragments of that lost society back into the fairy tales, the dreams and nightmares, of the recent past.

So in order to exorcize such ghosts, to expand the possibilities that are held within that quasi-academic kingdom and enable my history to move into wider realms of ancient possibility, I have added, as need arose, a second thread within my text that describes the ambience in which some of the major discoveries of our modern ‘ancient Egypt’ were made and, crucially, how they were first reported and translated, selected and explained; how, in short, those isolated, enigmatic ancient texts and artefacts were fitted into the standard narratives of Western history books.

I trust that the usual signposts of dates, dynasties and maps that I have set within my text will enable the reader to keep their place in ancient time and space. Accounting for the distant past in years BC/AD, however, sets up a tension all of its own, a conflict between present and past ideas of time and history. So it is good, always, to bear in mind that the first modern timetable of Egypt’s ancient history was laid out by a Frenchman named Jean François Champollion in a baroque palace in the City of Turin in 1824.

My history is divided into eight parts.

Part One describes the dramatic transformation at the pharaonic court which followed its adoption of written language, a transformation that gave voice and distance to previous generations and a greater depth, therefore, to that ancient courtly culture.

Part Two shows how, following the decipherment of that ancient written language in the early nineteenth century, the foundations of our present ‘ancient Egypt’ were laid down.

The following three parts describe the history of the Old Kingdom, a difficult period for traditional historians, for there is hardly any evidence on which to base their usual narratives. This, however, was the age in which the core identity of the pharaonic state matured and which later pharaonic courts took as their fundamental model. It is, therefore, a key period of pharaonic history.

Part Three begins in the time of the construction of the Giza pyramids and describes the royal and courtly households and the intelligence and sensibilities that were at work within them.

Part Four describes the age of the successors of the Giza kings and the ways and means by which their courts embellished and enlarged the unique pharaonic system of nourishment and survival, both before and after death.

Part Five, alternatively, describes the astonishing literature and lively monuments which that way of life inspired and thus offers explanation of those celebrated relics.

Part Six describes the dissolution of that four-century-long kingdom and finds reasons for its violent conclusion based upon hard evidence rather than political theory. And then, and most remarkably, we find that the Old Kingdom’s visions of life and death and government were taken up by farmers and administrators all along the lower Nile. And the pharaonic state was carefully and consciously revived.

The following two sections deal with the history of the Middle Kingdom; firstly with the revival of a unified pharaonic state, then with its elaboration and embellishment.

Part Seven describes the enormous efforts that were made at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom to restore the activity, the architectures and the rituals of the earlier court. The relics of this age, therefore, show us precisely what the pharaonic court of that time regarded as the essential elements of their courtly culture; of living ancient Egypt. And we witness the state literally rebuilding itself, opening old quarries, making new temples and tombs, sending expeditions across seas and deserts to obtain the essential elements of the apparatus and the materials, the rites and rituals, that were conducted in the living court and in the temples and tomb chapels. For this was not a kingdom based upon theology or social or political theory but on the daily actions of a court. Upon a sanctity of action.

Part Eight, the climax of the volume, re-creates something of the reality of the Middle Kingdom court and something also of the quality of daily life of the people in their kingdom. Hard and tough, practical and clever, this close-knit community of farmers, kings and courtiers, both the living and the dead, were bound together in a unique vision of the universe.

An Epilogue to this second volume discusses the extraordinary products of the Middle Kingdom court which are, arguably, the most perfect artefacts and writings to have survived from the three millennia of the pharaonic court’s existence. These powerful and familiar images were not introduced into the body of my history. At this point, however, they may be seen afresh.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The majority of the translations in my text are a synthesis of those of Lichtheim, Simpson, Parkinson and Wente, and I have tried to render those splendid works of scholarship in a uniform style that I hope is clear and consistent. Details of the sources that I have employed for each quotation are given in the Bibliography.

Ancient Egypt and adjacent regions during the mid second millennium BC.

Following the dictums of Gardiner and Faulkner – that the ambiguities in many ancient texts ultimately require their translators to intuit their meaning – I have naturally preferred those renderings that best illustrate the narratives which I describe. Despite their occasional differences, however, it seems to me that the essential content of most translations varies very little.

I have placed an ellipsis (…) where a translated text is either broken or has been abbreviated and I have occasionally added words in square brackets for their further elucidation. Translations of such common translated phrases as ‘Life, Prosperity and Health!’ and ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’, which are usually described as royal titularies or standard modes of address yet whose meanings remain elusive, have been avoided.

The forms of the names of ancient people and places which I have employed are those in common usage and have been adopted from such works as the recent catalogues of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. All royal names are given in a single form: Sneferu rather than Snofru; Khufu and not Cheops; Khafre and not Chephren; Isesi and not Djedkare-Izozi or the like; Wenis and not Unas; Intef rather than Inyotef; Montuhotep and not Menthotpe; Amenemhet and not Amenemes; Senwosret and not Senusret, nor Senwosre nor, certainly, Sesostris!

The spelling of most Arabic place names are those of a standard work, that of John Baines and Jaromir Malek’s Atlas of Ancient Egypt.

As with Volume 1, I have employed the word ‘Egypt’ as a modern geographic designation or in the case of ‘ancient Egypt’ as a term that describes modern visions of pharaonic culture – the term ‘culture’ defining a collection of objects sharing common manufacturing techniques and aesthetic properties and, by association, the people who made and used them.

I have designated the variously inhabited zones that are traditionally known as the ‘kingdom of ancient Egypt’, as ‘the region of the lower Nile’. It had extended northwards from the granite cataract by modern-day Aswan up into the river’s delta.

The term ‘Memphis’ does not refer to the ancient city of that name, which did not exist during the period of history covered in this volume, but to the region that was the centre of the Old Kingdom state. It is defined today by the thirty-mile-long line of monuments that extend along the west bank of the Nile opposite modern Cairo from Abu Roash in the north to Maidum in the south, and it includes the great cemeteries known loosely by the names of Saqqara, Abusir and Giza. For simplicity’s sake, I have placed the site known as Abu Ghurab under the heading of Abusir, since the monuments in those two adjacent locations were part of the same working establishment, and in a similar manner I have absorbed the site now known as Mazghuna into the plain of Dahshur, which lies a little to its north. On the other hand, I have divided Saqqara with its myriad of monuments into the two separate locations of central and south Saqqara.

I have also employed the term Memphite as an adjective, this usually in opposition to the term ‘provincial’ or ‘Theban’, the former referring to all the other ancient sites in the pharaonic purview, the latter to the southern settlement of Thebes. As in Volume 1, the term ‘settlement’ describes all conglomerations of buildings that are not cemeteries; no ancient Egyptian towns or cities in the modern sense of those two words are known to have existed.

The central institution of the ancient state, so the texts insistently inform us, was the royal residence, a large enclosure whose name was also employed to describe the state itself. Besides housing the apartments of the royal household and audience halls, the royal residences appear to have contained craftsmen’s studios along with numerous facilities that until quite recently were essential to the operation of any large domestic establishment.

The royal household appears to have contained pharaoh’s large extended family, though its members’ biological affiliations, let alone their emotional attachments, remain unclear. I have, accordingly, employed the term ‘queen’ to refer to the numerous women of the royal household and ‘princes’ to its somewhat less well-represented male occupants. Nothing is known of rights of succession to the throne, if such formulae had existed: precious little, indeed, is known about the role of pharaoh itself.

I have preferred the general term of ‘courtier’ rather than ‘minister’ to denominate those people whom contemporary texts describe as controlling some of the widespread activities of the pharaonic court, for the latter term easily suggests the existence of a highly structured bureaucracy whilst pharaoh’s kingdom appears to have operated as a top-down face-to-face enterprise. The texts further suggest that the pharaohs often met with the same small group of courtiers, some of whom I have loosely designated as ‘viziers’, ‘treasurers’ and the like, after modern translations of some of the epithets and titles that are listed upon their monuments. It is not clear, however, which, if any, of those titles described specific functions and, certainly, the texts inform us that individual courtiers had performed a wide diversity of tasks.

The ancient region of Memphis, with the modern names of the sites of the Old Kingdom Pyramids.

Like pharaoh and his household, many courtiers were connected with so-called governors and officials who lived in settlements along the region of the lower Nile and who headed households that appear to have operated smaller local versions of the courts within the royal residences.

On occasion, I have employed the term ‘noble’ to describe both courtiers and the heads of the families of local governors and estate owners with connections to the royal household, some of whom were buried in the splendidly decorated tombs that are now fixtures on the tourist trail and form a vivid part of the sustaining imagery of modern ancient Egypt.

The culture of both the Old and Middle Kingdoms, however, was centred on the royal residence. Not only is the residue of its activities the major source of modern information about the history of those times but those same activities were the contemporary definition of the pharaonic state itself. The use of the term ‘courtier’, therefore, should be extended beyond the usual modern connotations of governance to include all those people connected to the royal residence whose translated titles appear to award them such professions as ‘sculptors’, ‘jewellers’ and ‘priests’.

The term ‘priest’, indeed, is used to describe a number of ancient titles that today we would categorize as ‘religious’ but whose functions revolved around the collection and dispersal of the goods that were the beating heart of state activity. In similar fashion, the terms ‘state cults’, ‘temples’ and ‘tomb chapels’ refer to activities and establishments in which priests made offerings to the kings, to the gods and to the dead, actions that were a microcosm of the mechanisms that sustained the apparatus of the living state.

I have not employed the word ‘tax’, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘an assessed money payment’, to describe how the various offices and activities of state were sustained, for it is not applicable to a system that operated without that relatively modern concept. The word ‘tithe’ which I have used in its place should not, however, be taken in its literal sense as a tenth part of an agricultural crop, but as a portmanteau term to contain the diversity of methods that were employed to supply state institutions.

In similar fashion, I have used the term ‘levee’ to describe the methods employed by the pharaonic court to raise the mass labour that it required for the colossal projects that it continually undertook. The term should not suggest the horrors undergone by Egyptian villagers in the course of the last two centuries when they were conscripted levée en masse but simply the raising of mass labour in a non-monetary economy. For obvious reasons, I have preferred the terms ‘farmer’ and ‘farm worker’ to ‘fellah’ or ‘peasant’.

Finally, please note that the ancient people such as Hardjedef, Antefoker and Heqanakht who are named within my text are simply examples of those rare occurrences where a number of ancient texts that apparently refer to a single person have survived along with descriptions of some of their activities. Although I have employed their names in the hope that some idea of those lives and times may build up in the reader’s mind, it should not be imagined that those individuals were necessarily outstanding historical personalities. For the most part their continued presence within the high formalities of the majority of ancient texts is but an accident of time. The vizier Antefoker, for example, was one of at least twenty Middle Kingdom so-called viziers whose names are mostly known from the inscriptions on their funerary arrangements, but of whom little other information appears to have survived.

PART ONE

After the Great Pyramids

History and Hieroglyphs

1

The Story up to Now

A History in Pyramids

After the Great Pyramid everything changed. The largest and most accurate stone block building ever made, it had been one of four similarly vast monuments that were erected in a hundred-year period at the middle of the third millennium BC. The first two of those gigantic structures were built during the lengthy reign of Sneferu; the third, the Great Pyramid with its extraordinary architectural refinement, in the reign of Khufu, his successor; the last, and the Great Pyramid’s majestic partner on the Cairo skyline, for Khafre, probably one of Khufu’s grandsons, who had ruled the region of the lower Nile from about 2540 BC. Apart from several other enormous building projects that were undertaken in the same span of time, those four great funerary monuments alone had consumed more than seventeen million tons of limestone. That is to say, for their completion within that single century, around 240 building blocks, each one weighing two and a half tons, would have had to have been set into their positions on one of those four great pyramids in the course of each and every working day.

Those four colossal monuments are the iconic products of the world’s first-known state; a Bronze Age kingdom which had consisted of a royal residence with satellites and suppliers and myriad farming settlements set all along the flood plain of the lower Nile. With a combined population, so best estimates would currently suggest, of around a million people the logistics of provisioning the construction of those pyramids – a state-wide system of supply which had transported enormous tonnages of stone and copper, food and timber all up and down the great wide river – would have required the active participation of a large part of the population and put a strain upon the rest. When it was over, the enterprise had transformed the culture of the pharaonic state giving it a unique self confidence, a powerful and mature identity.

After those four great pyramids, a 300-year-long line of smaller royal pyramids was set along the ending of the river’s valley one following the other. Together, they span the era that is now known as the Old Kingdom. Each of these lesser later pyramids was built for a different king and all of them were set within a fifteen-mile line stretching southwards from the latitude of modern Cairo down along the high western horizon of the Nile Valley into the sandy desert cemeteries of Saqqara. With their dimensions standardized at around one third of the Great Pyramid’s enormous bulk and with their exterior angles and their internal architecture derived from those of the older and much larger pyramids, these later monuments are relatively similar. So Western histories, which are based on narratives of incident and progress, might well conclude that after the construction of those earlier, grander and more innovative monuments, ancient Egypt’s history had slowed. What, in reality, had happened was that the focus of the pharaonic court had shifted.

After the four great pyramids, and for the first time in the history of pharaonic culture, all those earlier enterprises were reassessed: the courtly offices and the organizations responsible for their construction, classified, developed and described in a mass of texts and images. The age of continuous cultural innovation had passed forever: from now on that would no longer be the pharaonic way. Over the following two millennia, pharaonic history would take the form of a series of successive periods of dissolution, stasis and renewal accompanied by bouts of deliberation and elaboration, both literary and visual, on life and death within the state that the great pyramid makers had constructed. Along with a few remarkable adventures that would shake the court from top to bottom, the story of those reflections and renaissances comprises a most exotic history, one quite foreign to the modern world.

2

Writing Changes Everything

After 2540 BC, from about the same time that the court masons had started to build royal pyramids far smaller than before, the chapels of the courtiers’ tombs which previously had been little more than decorated corridors set into rectangles of stone were expanded and embellished, a metamorphosis of architecture and decoration that grew till it comprised a series of impressive rooms. Several of these celebrated monuments – the tomb chapels of Tiy, Mereruka and Ptahhotep, for example, their shadowed walls covered with scenes of so-called ‘daily life’ – are now icons of pharaonic culture and firm fixtures on the tourist trail. Freestanding sculptures were also placed within these sumptuous chapels, many of considerable quality. And monumental written texts, which previously had been but sparely used, became a commonplace: texts describing the activities pictured in the reliefs covering the tomb chapels’ walls; texts outlining schemes of offerings for the dead and describing lands and titles held or granted by the king; texts telling of a tomb’s commissioning or recording an encounter or a correspondence with pharaoh.

About half way through those considerable processes of change, at around 2380 BC, the interior passages and chambers of the royal pyramids, which previously had not had a single image drawn upon their walls, were also engraved with hieroglyphic texts, a practice that continued down to the Old Kingdom’s ending. These are the so-called ‘Pyramid Texts’ and they are the oldest-known body of texts to have survived from ancient Egypt.

Of themselves, the hieroglyphs that were engraved within the tomb chapels and pyramids were neither rare nor innovatory, having been employed for a wide variety of tasks for many centuries. Yet the hieroglyphs engraved within the pyramids were employed in a different manner from anything that had gone before, when for the most part those same signs had been used to record names and titles and simple lists of goods. If such a usage may be considered to have had a grammar, it was a grammar like that held by labelled goods upon a supermarket shelf; that is, the signs and words had mainly served as elements of identification and numeration in a system of stocking and supply which in the case of pharaonic Egypt had provisioned the families and dependents of the kings and the officials of the royal court. Seldom had such usage required the composition of whole sentences and only very seldom had one sentence followed another. By the mid point of the third millennium BC, however, in that turning world as the size of the royal pyramids diminished, the use of hieroglyphic was extended so that it could hold a self-contained writing system with a grammar that seems to have reproduced some elements of spoken language.

The family tomb of a courtier of Khufu, c. 2575 BC, and that of another noble family c. 2315 BC. Apart from holding deep vertical shafts leading to subterranean burial vaults, the earlier tombs are largely solid blocks of stone and rubble.

Though a few surviving earlier texts anticipate this remarkable development, traditional historians have long regarded this sudden eruption of words and writing within the monuments of the later Old Kingdom as the time when the curtains of the prehistoric past had parted to reveal the living world of ancient Egypt. The contemporary scribes and courtiers, upon the other hand, had not. They considered the previous and now largely silent era when the four colossal pyramids had been built as the age in which their courtly culture gained maturity. And so in later ages, prayers were composed to Sneferu that addressed him as a god and building blocks from the temples that had stood beside the four great pyramids were placed like seeds inside the bulk of smaller, later pyramids. Texts too, that were considered to have been composed in that epic age were regarded with a kind of awe. Ruefully addressing a blank sheet of papyrus, a tongue-tied scribe of later times writes that he hopes to find different words from those used by his ancestors, whilst a passage in another text tells how a king ordered some old scrolls to be spread out before him so that he could see how things should be done ‘in a proper manner’. Even the so-called ‘Instruction Texts’ – compilations of saws and etiquette which list some of the manners of Old Kingdom court society in excruciating detail – defer to the near silent age of the colossal pyramids: the age, so it has recently been suggested, that had been anciently identified as the epitome of the pharaonic state within a century or so of its conclusion.

Given the prestige of the early pyramid-building kings, it is hardly surprising that the first lines of one of those Instruction Texts identifies its author as a prince named Hardjedef, a man whom other texts describe as a son of the Pharaoh Khufu, for whom the Great Pyramid of Giza had been built.

The beginning of the instruction which the hereditary prince and count, the king’s son Hardjedef made for his son, named Au-ire. He says:

Reprove yourself in your own eyes in order that another man does not reprove you.

When you prosper, found your household and acquire for yourself a woman who is mistress of her heart, that a son will be born to you …

In somewhat similar fashion, a passage from a Book of the Dead – from texts written to accompany the dead a thousand years and more after King Khufu’s time – describes Prince Hardjedef as having rediscovered the text of a funerary rite that had previously been ‘a great secret, unseen and unperceived’.

Such assertions need not be taken at face value. Before the age of printing and modern notions of authorship and copyright, literary attributions had different purposes and meanings from those that we assume today. In claiming ancient authorship, the authors of those later texts – whose literary styles alone show that they were writing many centuries after Khufu’s time – may simply have been providing the words they were about to write with the gravitas of deep antiquity.

Yet once there really was a prince of Khufu’s time named Hardjedef. His tomb still stands upon the Giza Plateau in the evening shadow of that pharaoh’s pyramid. And as a few rare graffiti of ‘the work gang [named] Khufu-is-drunk’ that are painted on some of its building blocks attest, the prince’s massive stone block tomb had been built by some of that king’s pyramid makers.

Copies of graffiti painted on the stone blocks of Hardjedef’s mastaba, which name three contemporary stone-working gangs.

In the manner of his times, Prince Hardjedef was interred underneath the centre of his tomb in a granite sarcophagus which had been lowered down a deep vertical shaft and set into a tiny rock-hewn chamber at the bottom. ‘The body’, so his excavators found in 1925, ‘was intact and in position. Head east, lying on left side, contracted, hands straight out in front of pelvis. Tall old man. Backbone intact but carefully severed between 8th and 9th vertebra … Skull had toppled over from neck and lay almost in position near south wall opposite the door.’

Hardjedef’s tomb is but one of some 200 similarly enormous monuments – the so-called Giza mastabas – which in Khufu’s day had been set across that windy plateau in sullen sandy grids. Many other members of the royal household were interred within those same vast cemeteries and in the same manner as Prince Hardjedef, yet most of them today are little more than the names that are inscribed upon their monuments. That single prince alone seems to have gained an aura of celebrity, and that within a century or so of his interment. For when the archaeologists were clearing drifted sand from the area around his tomb they came across the inscribed remnants of several modest monuments set up in later ages. And one of those memorials, after asking passers-by to recite a prayer so that a courtier named Kha could receive more offerings at his tomb, continues by describing Kha as ‘one who adores Hardjedef’.

The Giza Plateau in the time of the pyramid builders, showing the position of Hardjedef’s tomb.

Writing had changed everything. A single prince who present records seem to show had lived and died in a pre-literary age had been transformed into an ageless literary personality. Nor was the potential of this new-found lease of life, this extra presence amongst the living, which previously would have depended on the continuous ration of offerings placed within his tomb chapel, lost on succeeding generations. For in the following millennium court scribes would proudly claim that, rather than colossal tombs, written words were by far the best memorials.

A man is dead; his corpse is in the ground. When all his family are laid in the earth, it is writing that lets him be remembered … scrolls are more useful than a house or chapels on the west, they are more perfect than palace towers and longer-lasting than a monument within a temple.

Is there anyone here like Hardjedef? Is there another like Imhotep? [another literary personality] … They are gone, their names might be forgotten but writings cause them to be remembered.

Prince Hardjedef makes several more appearances in later texts, most famously in the elegant calligraphic script of a papyrus – known now as the Papyrus Westcar, and written some five centuries after the prince’s lifetime – that tells a series of tales which are all set in the fabled courts of the great pyramid-building kings. These literary courts are a far cry from the hard reality, the dust and haste that must have filled the offices of the overseers of the construction of the four great pyramids. These texts describe tranquil, even hedonistic, palaces, where furniture is made of gold and ebony, where boatloads of scantily clad virgins are set to row across a lake to tickle the royal fancy, and Prince Hardjedef plies the Nile upon a royal barge to bring soothsayers such as the learned Djedi to entertain the king. And after Djedi had performed prodigious acts of magic for his majesty and looked deep into his kingdom’s future, Khufu commanded that he was to be sent to ‘the house of the king’s son Hardjedef, that he may dwell there with him, where his rations should be fixed at one thousand loaves of bread, one hundred jugs of beer, an ox, and one hundred bundles of vegetables. And they did all that His Majesty had commanded’.

Such stories are not as straightforward as they might first appear. Just as it has been observed of Flaubert’s Egyptian Diaries that rather than simply recording a visit to nineteenth-century Egypt they are also an elaboration of the accounts of earlier European travellers to the Orient, so, too, the texts that mention Hardjedef are part of a pharaonic literary tradition.

And more than that. For just as Hardjedef, a prince of Khufu’s court, lived on in ancient literary memory, so today his name appears in histories of ancient Egypt where, for the lack of any other information, the simple tales of the Papyrus Westcar are taken as a prime source of the history of the period. Hardly a single modern history book, indeed, describes the historical changes that followed the building of the four colossal pyramids without reference to the tales of the Papyrus Westcar. So this slimmest of novellas, written in a different age, has become a part of ancient Egypt’s modern history, part of the history of that vital period in which the largest and most complex structures the ancient world would ever make were being erected and the fundamental structures of pharaonic culture were in the process of their definition.

So whilst Hardjedef the man is represented only by his bones and by a tomb upon the Giza Plateau that bears his name, Hardjedef the literary prince appears in both ancient Egyptian literature and also in modern histories as a great sage, as the pious author of religious texts and as a character in tales fit for the Brothers Grimm, in which it is assumed genuine dynastic politics are described. And every fresh-found occurrence of that prince’s name, each new-found hieroglyphic epithet, adds weight and substance to this literary figure, whilst that enormous tomb upon the Giza Plateau underlines the fact that this complex, composite, largely literary figure is based, somehow, on cold hard fact.

To that extent, Prince Hardjedef is a perfect metaphor for modern histories of pharaonic culture. Just as the Old Testament, with its descriptions of camels and coinage, of slavery and international warfare, invests its descriptions of Bronze Age Palestine with the ills and angsts of Hellenistic Alexandria where it was compiled and edited, just as Shakespeare’s kings are viewed through the politics and preoccupations of his own times, so too our modern histories of ancient Egypt are filled with sentiments and narratives of later times and other cultures. And by far the largest of these influences are from the ages in which egyptology itself was born, which, as with Flaubert’s Diaries, was nineteenth-century Europe.

In large part this unusual situation is a product of the lack of any other information to contradict such parochial histories. None of the texts that have survived from ancient Egypt are written histories. All which has survived from that colossal wreck is a myriad of names, epithets and titles, letters, dockets and accounts and some tracts concerning ritual and the afterlife. That, and a few royal records and decrees and some fragments such as the Papyrus Westcar, form a so-called literary corpus that is so ill-preserved that its remnants are presently contained in one stout paperback.

Nor is there reason to imagine that an ancient Gibbon or Macaulay lies buried in the sand. Neither, in the event that such unlikely treasures were to be uncovered, could it be assumed that they had performed the same roles in their society as do histories today. Unlike ancient Greece and Rome or, indeed, the modern world, the histories, theologies and legal codes of the pharaonic kingdom were not laid out in written words. It was not that kind of culture. It inhabited a different time, a different space. And at its ending, a wise Egyptian living in Hellenistic Alexandria had understood that difference, warning that the ostentatious chatter of the Greeks whose philosophy, he says, is but ‘an empty noise of argument’ would threaten the very core of the venerable pharaonic culture which ‘uses no arguments …’, and if that should happen, the melancholy sage continues, then the ancient and most holy valley of the Nile, ‘this copy of heaven … the abode of shrines and temples, will be most full of graves and of dead men’.

That canny Alexandrian describes a dilemma faced by the historians of all cultures in which literature was not the main means of expression. To some extent, it is the same problem that is faced today by visitors to exhibitions of old master paintings. Like ancient Egypt, those venerable Western images have long been the focus of an academic industry whose primary means of expression is the written word. And though it is difficult to precisely detail the effects of that continuing blizzard of written information – the pictures’ titles, their identification and their various explanations, the writings of historians and theologians, of Vasari, Shelley and Madame Sesostris – it inevitably alters our appreciation of those silent images. For, in the modern world, writing changes everything.

What hope, therefore, that traditional histories of ancient Egypt, which are largely based on translations of randomly surviving fragments of non-historical texts, can begin to encompass the true history of such a vastly visual culture as that of pharaonic Egypt? Nonetheless, the powerful drug of two centuries of academic research has persuaded a large part of the modern world that it can and that the yawning gap between the modern world and the most ancient of all kingdoms has been securely bridged.

Yet as you stand today amidst the graceful relics of the ancient culture of the lower Nile, in a tomb or temple or even a museum, a sense of dislocation hangs all around, like incense in the air. In earlier times the mystery of another world that seems just out of reach was explained with the aid of alchemical texts and Gnostic tracts; today, the popular media pretends that ‘scientific breakthroughs’ will serve for its elucidation. In reality, after two centuries of study and excavation, the non-stop flood of written data has simply heightened that age-old sense of separation.

This is the mystery of ancient Egypt. This is what keeps us peering into Tutankhamun’s inlaid eyes wondering what had lain behind them. As the eminent egyptologist James Allen recently observed, we are ‘like paleontologists, able to assemble impressive reconstructions of long-dead species, but still with only a vague notion of what they looked like in the flesh’.

3

Reviving Hardjedef?

Ironically enough, only the first half of the ancient culture of the lower Nile – its pre-literary phase – holds the narratives of a truly modern history within it, for its relics contain clear evidence of material and political development. The second more familiar half of Egypt’s ancient history, alternatively, the age of written texts, shows no evidence of such developments. In strictly material terms, indeed, the literary pharaonic state may be said to have been a period of overall decline. Yet in that second phase a marvellous architecture was developed, the pharaohs went adventuring, Hardjedef, some bones in a sarcophagus, obtained a literary afterlife and almost every element of that courtly culture was elaborated and refined. Such opulent millennia, therefore, must surely hold great histories of their own.

That at least is the belief which has inspired a 200-year-old academic industry to continue to scrutinize the writings that survive and generate the papers, catalogues and theses that are the raw materials of traditional historians. Naturally, such text-based histories may only be revised or enlarged by the reconsideration of previously studied texts or by the incorporation of new-found documents into the previously established body of information, a process that has become an ongoing international academic project that, with its specializations and its particular vocabularies, provides the impression of a scientific progress; the illusion of ‘the unfolding excellence of fact’.

There are three fundamental flaws in this approach. Firstly, the overwhelming emphasis on literary-based evidence has served to cut the seamless history of pharaonic culture into two separate halves, pre-literary and literary.

Secondly, as writing of itself was an activity restricted to relatively small circles of people inside the pharaonic state, ancient Egyptian history changes from that of a history of an entire population in its pre-literary phases to that of the history of the careers of some individual courtiers and hardly ever of the court they served. Here, however, the surviving texts sometimes provide fragments of a history that hold within them the vividness of living language, real events.

The third objection to this approach is that the spare data that the surviving texts supply are entirely insufficient to support most of the narratives of modern histories. Just one papyrus, for example, the so-called Papyrus Westcar, records the tale of Hardjedef at Khufu’s court. No one knows its origin. It lacks both a beginning and an end and there is no certainty as to the date of its composition. Yet, for want of any other information, historians frequently employ that story and others in that same papyrus as prime sources for the history of the period known nowadays as the Old Kingdom.

Traditional histories of the Old Kingdom, indeed, are especially slight because, unlike the mass of extraordinary visual evidence from those times, the surviving written data is extremely scanty and the era of itself is very long. Before the 1840s, European historians had hardly noticed it at all and the four colossal pyramids were portrayed as the products of a primitive and savage age of unfathomable antiquity. In 1879, in Professor Brugsch’s great history of the pharaohs, the Old Kingdom’s 400 years still only occupied twenty pages in comparison with the 450 that describe the later periods. And in 1961, in the similarly sized history of Sir Alan Gardiner – arguably the greatest egyptologist to have worked in the English language – the history of the Old Kingdom only occupies twice that amount.

So slight, indeed, is surviving written information from all periods of pharaonic history that it can only serve as the solid basis for an outline of a text-based political history for a few centuries during the second millennium BC. Thus traditional histories of ancient Egypt have to be glued together from an incredible mishmash of materials; from tales like those in Papyrus Westcar, from calendar dates written on loaves of bread and jars of wine, from speculations based on everything from reconstructed family quarrels, the political use of magic, and the operation of the Roman damnatio memoriae, and from those rare contemporary texts that record single, usually unrelated, incidents.

This fundamental lack of data makes it impossible to construct a conventional history of pharaonic culture without the broad assumption that, allowing for some environmental differences, life in the ancient courtly culture of the lower Nile had been similar to life within the states of early modern European courts. Only then can traditional historical narratives be constructed.

The common illusion that the ways and means of European courtly culture were also operating in the ancient culture of the lower Nile is greatly aided by the terms usually employed to describe the inhabitants of pharaoh’s court. Simple English words like ‘dynasty’ and ‘kings’, ‘palaces’ and ‘fortresses’, ‘queens’, ‘priests’ and ‘generals’ along with myriad other translated epithets and titles, encourage would-be historians to lapse into the narratives of nineteenth-century European Romanticism.

So it is hardly surprising that traditional histories of ancient Egypt tell bourgeois tales of kings and princes, of harems and fine artists, of noble courtiers, great generals with mighty armies guarding a nation state of nuclear families, with customs posts and a quasi-cash economy. At first glance, this twilight world seems able to account for almost everything in pharaohland whilst any awkward discrepancies are explained away as evidence of residual savagery or nascent orientalism. What in reality this weird scenario has produced is a mid-Victorian ancient Egypt filled up with the prejudices – racial, ethnic and social – of that era. An ancient Egypt in which pharaohs live in sensible domesticity, undertake imperial diplomacy through the usual channels, whose soldiers are adept at bivouac and manoeuvre, whose priests are envious and jealous, whose scholar-scribes are industrious and profound and whose labourers in the usual way are loyal, comical and devious. And all the while the beauteous mass of ancient things which the craftsmen of the pharaonic culture made with such an extraordinary care flap like butterflies at the window of the seminar room, unnoticed and abandoned.

The supreme irony in this is that though written texts were never at the heart of pharaonic culture, those that have survived have played a major role in the construction of modern ancient Egypt. Such a fundamental role, in fact, that ever since Jean François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, the study and translation of pharaonic texts has continuously distorted a broader understanding of that ancient culture.

This is not to pretend that hieroglyphic texts have no place in histories of pharaonic culture. Nor, certainly, that the thin corpus of historical fact derived from pharaonic texts which underpins our modern ‘ancient Egypt’ should be abandoned. Over the past two centuries the advances that followed Champollion’s decipherment have brought us to a brand new understanding of that lost and distant past, one that the modern world, if not Egypt’s ancient scribes, can readily comprehend. A reliable chronology, an essential element of any modern history, has been established. Most known texts have been analysed, translated and shrewdly judged. So along with the vocabulary of prince, priest, pyramid and the rest, which has become the language of this past’s description, the information held in that research now frames all modern orderings and explanations of the ancient culture of the lower Nile.

This, then, is the stage on which all new histories of this ‘ancient Egypt’ are acted out. And it was made in Europe in two separate stages. The first of these, when Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered, when the fundamental vocabulary that yet describes the offices of pharaoh’s kingdom was laid down and the broad chronology of the later literate phases of pharaonic culture was established, took place in the decades that followed the French Revolution and reflects the spirit of that age. The second stage, when that earlier vision of pharaonic culture was brought to its first maturity, when ‘what had been made readable by the decipherment of hieroglyphs, was understood’, took place in German universities in the decades before the First World War. This was the age in which egyptology’s traditional vocabulary was endorsed in the name of science, when the structures of hieroglyphic grammar were set within the framework of classical philology and a standard hieroglyphic dictionary was compiled. And those researches are filled with the spirit, the disturbing rhetoric, of those times. And those narratives and attitudes, their sense of social order and of time and place, are an integral part of modern ‘ancient Egypt’.

To make new histories of old Egypt, therefore, both elements of this strange confection – both the relics of old Egypt and their interpretation throughout the last two centuries – must be brought into play.

PART TWO

Making ‘Ancient Egypt’

Champollion and his

Successors

4

In the Beginning

MISE EN SCÈNE

I have only tried to indicate the many important consequences of my discovery which arose naturally from my main subject; the alphabet of the phonetic hieroglyphs … This may perhaps add something to the record of … the Egyptians, whose fame still echoes round the world.

Jean François Champollion, 1822

A great number of books and articles have been written describing the decipherment of pharaonic hieroglyphs by Jean François Champollion in the early 1820s, and most of them are concerned with arguments of academic precedence. Was it a Briton or a Dane, a Frenchman or a Swede who had first understood how hieroglyphs should be read? They miss the point. By the 1820s, the decipherment of ancient Eastern scripts had become a polymath’s parlour game for European scholars and one that eventually resulted in what an assyriologist has called a ‘cascade of decipherment’. Amongst all of the would-be decipherers of hieroglyphic, however, Champollion alone had a lifelong commitment to the study of pharaonic culture, such dedication that even his enemies had dubbed him ‘l’Égyptien’. So after he had solved a great part of the scholarly riddle of the hieroglyphs – a process in which he was aided, doubtless, by the observations of several of his contemporaries – Champollion devoted the remainder of his life to ordering, cataloguing and explaining the relics of pharaonic Egypt. And the methods and terminologies that he and his immediate successors developed remain the bedrock of the study of that culture down till today.

First news of Champollion’s decipherment had stirred considerable excitement amongst fellow scholars, many of whom were occupied in the exploration of the roots of language and of European nationhood. Further readings of his later papers, however, which appeared throughout the 1820s and were concerned with the order and history of pharaonic society, had seemed to strip the magic from a fabled kingdom that the West had considered to be a fount of wisdom and enlightenment since classical times.

Born of the Bible and the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, the antique vision of pharaonic Egypt had been